Articles Tagged "Christopher C. Horner"

The guys over at Chilling Effect offer their take on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s wonderful petition of the EPA demanding a bit of a trial on the premise for its “endangerment” finding that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is real, threatening, and proven — or sufficiently proven to justify regulation, even if nothing the U.S. can do through regulation would do anything about the purported warming.

The EPA is of course ducking the opportunity to finally and for the first time make its case. To this point, they have appealed to authority of the IPCC, which says on its web page that it doesn’t perform any research. That should tell you as much as you need to know about their confidence in the case: it’s nonexistent, and they are filled with terror over the thought of having to defend their stance.

The beauty of the regulatory process for them is the presumption, or “deference,” granted whatever they do. They lose that in a trial, and as a matter of substance, cannot make up for it.

The Environmental Protection Agency is pushing the greatest regulatory intervention in US history, seeking to declare that carbon dioxide poses an “endangerment” under the Clean Air Act, threatening human health and the environment. To hear the EPA tell it, CO2 – which nonetheless remains indispensible to life on earth and without which plants die, more of which produces higher crop yields, etc. – will kill us all.

This proposal is a cornerstone of the Obama administration’s attempt to bring the energy sector of the economy under state control just as it seeks to do with health care, essentially ruining something in order to take it over in the name of cleaning up capitalism’s mess. It’s an old play, which the statists have run for decades, certain that every now and then it will break for a big gain. But an inconvenient EPA career professional just doing his job assessed the premise and informed his superiors, in the sole substantive report presented in the Agency’s internal deliberations, that upon scrutiny CO2 clearly does not drive temperatures or climate but oddly enough, the sun and oceans do. His boss told him to shut up, that nothing good could come to their office by injecting this analysis into the process, as the decision had been made.

Anyone who has even casually encountered the global warming industry knows that this crowd's first response to any challenge, of any sort, from any source, is to go ad hominem. Ad hom is a way to change the subject by people for whom the facts are not helpful. As we also see in the case of EPA getting caught suppressing the sole substantive report submitted as part of its "internal deliberation" over whether to seize the energy sector of the economy, it also reveals staggering ignorance about the issue on a par with President Obama's recent claim that carbon dioxide, eh, "contaminate[s] the water we drink and pollute[s] the air we breathe." He said, opening a Perrier and exhaling a sigh...

They know what they need to know, and that is that it has been decided that this is the vehicle for long-desired "social change", and whatever means that are necessary will be employed. Facts and logic are, to these people, for losers.

We see it again today, in a Washington Times story about the suppressed report. There we read that a spokeswoman for EPA administrator Lisa P. Jackson, who made the determination that CO2 threatens the world, "noted that the memo's author, Alan Carlin, is an economist, not a climate scientist". Funny how people tasked with certain jobs become unqualified only when they are inconvenient.

Canadians and Americans place climate change near bottom of priorities

Barack Obama, on his first foreign trip as President to Canada, will then lecture the United States’ largest trading partner and source of energy imports on the need for a renewed commitment to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions.

Both governments claim to be forging ahead with what’s known as a cap-and-trade system, domestically and internationally, through a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, expected to be signed later this year.

The most expensive secret you’re not supposed to know is that George W. Bush leaves office with the planet cooler than when he entered. This dangerous trend threatens the multi-billion dollar “global warming” industry, adding new urgency to the ritual shriek of “we must act now!” in the scramble to impose a costly regime of mandates and energy taxes...

Someone just sent me a transcript of a taped interview with Jerry North of Texas A&M doing what he can to diminish climate skepticism and some individual skeptics — and, in the process, merely diminishing himself...